[31] "As a field for testing the value of inoculation, the tea-factories of India possess many advantages. The labourers being under contract, the after-history of those inoculated is easily followed up. Each morning the adults are paraded for roll-call; and all sick must attend hospital, where a record is made of their disease and treatment." (Dr. Powell, Lancet, 13th July 1896.)
[32] "It is unfortunate that neither of the fatal cases among the inoculated was seen by any medical man, not even an unqualified doctor Babu." Dr. Powell does not think, from what was told him, that one of them was cholera.
[33] It is said that the Jains object to inoculations on the grounds of religion; and one or two witnesses before the Plague Commission gave evidence to the same effect. But, at Bombay, the high-priest of a great religious community addressed a meeting of 5000 in favour of the new treatment; and the rush of suppliants for inoculation at Hubli and Gaday proves that there is no real religious difficulty. Doctors have been assaulted, as at Poona, so at Oporto; in neither case can we say Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum.
[34] Compare the account of the inoculations at Gaday, in the Lancet, 11th February 1898: "To see the crowd waiting and struggling to pass the barrier is a strange sight; old men and women, young children, and mothers with babes in their arms, form a daily crowd numbered by hundreds, who wait for hours to get their chance of the day's inoculation."
[35] Compare the account given by the Rev. H. Haigh (Methodist Recorder, December 1898), of the plague at Bangalore: "The native population do all they can to elude the vigilance of the authorities. In order to escape segregation, the householders in many instances refrain from reporting plague, and not infrequently bury the corpse secretly. Not only is any spare piece of ground used as a burial-place, but the body is at times thrown into a well or tank, or dropped over the wall of some European compound. During one week three plague corpses were found, badly decomposed, in reservoirs commonly resorted to for drinking purposes."
[36] For the whole subject, see Lancet, 9th September 1899, paper by Surgeon-Major Birt and Surgeon-Captain Lamb. Two other cases of accidental inoculation occurred at Netley.
[37] For Dr. Graham's experiments at Beyrout, which seem to prove that the mosquito can also convey dengue or dandy-fever, see the New York Medical Record, 8th February 1902.
[38] Sir Patrick Manson, in the British Medical Journal, 29th September 1900, gives the following account of this experiment:—"A wooden hut, constructed in England, was shipped to Italy and erected in the Roman Campagna, at a spot ascertained by Dr. L. Sambon, after careful inquiry, to be intensely malarial, where the permanent inhabitants all suffer from malarial cachexia, and where the field-labourers, who come from healthy parts of Italy to reap the harvest, after a short time all contract fever. This fever-haunted spot is in the King of Italy's hunting-ground near Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber. It is waterlogged and jungly, and teems with insect life. The only protection employed against mosquito-bite and fever by the experimenters who occupied this hut was mosquito-netting, wire screens in doors and windows, and, by way of extra precaution, mosquito-nets round their beds. Not a grain of quinine was taken. They go about the country quite freely—always, of course, with an eye on Anopheles—during the day, but are careful to be indoors from sunset to sunrise. Up to 21st September, the date of Dr. Sambon's last letter to me, the experimenters and their servants had enjoyed perfect health, in marked contrast to their neighbours, who were all of them either ill with fever, or had suffered malarial attacks."
[39] This paper, by Dr. Stephens, gives also the reasons why equally good results were not obtained at Mian Mir, Punjab. The whole paper is of great interest.
[40] It is not denied here that he made five experiments on human beings. See Part IV. chap. ii.